It’s that time of year again- the time when your employee performance review is due. Have you ever had one completed on time? How well does your performance review process perform?

Employee performance reviews are an important tool in helping everyone in your organization do their best work. They provide performance feedback and can serve as a roadmap for guiding an employee’s professional development. One could argue that, along with recruiting, they are one of your organization’s best instruments for cultivating talent.

Yet they are often viewed as bureaucratic paperwork. Supervisors have other tasks that seem more relevant and more urgent. Pending performance reviews pile up, become overdue and may even become an object of dread. However, what can feel like busywork is actually quite important, and maybe even critical from the employee’s point of view if it is tied to a merit-based salary adjustment. So what’s the best way of dealing with performance reviews?

Employee performance reviews are a perfect example of a business process that begs to be handled by a service management system. Employee performance reviews:

Are repeated (both for individual employees and across employees)

Require input from multiple parties

Need to be completed in a timely fashion and in the order in which they’re due

Require security and confidentiality

An effective way to deal with employee performance reviews is to handle them in Jira Service Desk (JSD). As part of the Jira platform, JSD is based on a sophisticated and flexible workflow management system that streamlines work processes and provides end-to-end traceability. ProForma’s employee performance review template allows a supervisor to complete a review with input from the affected employee. HR can then check over the review before it is sent to the employee for sign-off (including the option for the employee to disagree with the assessment). Finally, HR receives the finalized performance appraisal and closes the issue. Sound like every other performance review? Yes and no. Since the performance review is conducted within a Jira request it has several advantages:

It’s an efficient way to handle a process that requires input from multiple parties. There’s no risk of the process getting bottlenecked in somebody’s inbox.

Requests are put in a queue ensuring that they are handled, and handled in the order they should be.

All the information remains attached to a Jira request so it can be checked at any moment to see it’s real time status. Issues can be queried or aggregated into a report to demonstrate compliance.

The entire process can be paper-free using ProForma’s integration with HelloSign, decreasing the risk of a confidentiality breach.

Check out the video below to see how the ProForma template for employee performance reviews (one of over 100 processes available in the ProForma Template Library) works. Then avoid the dread and do your next performance review in Jira.